Asia

Religious persecution in Indonesia

SO, WHAT sort of sentence do you think a man convicted of killing someone by smashing in his skull with a stone might get in Indonesia? Life? Thirty years in prison? Twenty? Five? No. Three months, apparently.

At least, that was the sentence handed down by a court in Java on July 28th against Dani bin Misra. He was part of a frenzied mob of Sunni Muslim chauvinists, about 1,000 strong, that hacked and beat to death three members of the minority Ahmadi sect of Islam in February. Eleven others were on trial (including the cleric pictured above, white turban on the left). None of the guilty received more than six months for their crimes; none of them were even accused of murder.

Australia's asylum-seekers

EVER since a conservative government under John Howard launched Australia's so-called Pacific Solution to repel boat people ten years ago, the country's political leaders have been vying to stop asylum-seekers landing by sea. On July 25th, Julia Gillard's Labor government signed a deal with Malaysia that it hopes will trump all previous moves. Australia will send the next 800 boat people who sail into its northern waters to Malaysia. There they will join about 90,000 other asylum-seekers who have been waiting, some of them for years, to have their claims assessed.

Thailand's monarchy

WHOEVER assumes the role of foreign minister in Thailand's new government, which is expected to form by mid-August, can look forward to a full inbox. Tensions with Cambodia and regional rumblings over China's maritime claims will require attention. So, too, will an impounded Boeing 737 in Munich, which was grounded on July 12th and whose ownership is at the centre of a diplomatic row with Germany.

The plane is the plaything of Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, 59, a military-trained pilot who is fond of extended European jaunts. Its seizure, by a German liquidator trying to recoup €36m ($52m) from the Thai government, is rather inconvenient for his highness.

Corruption in Korean pop music

WITH its over-reliance on manufactured teen pop, and a leave-nothing-to-chance managerial style reminiscent of Phil Spector (minus the murder), there are obvious parallels between “K-Pop” and the American music industry of the 1950s and 60s. And perhaps now another box can be checked: the practice of bribing one's way onto the charts. That's payola, or 증회 in Korean.

Twenty-nine people, mainly radio and cable-TV staff, have been arrested on suspicion of accepting cash payments in return for airplay or fraudulent chart positions.

India's central bank

SITTING in the office of an Indian boss when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) raises interest rates with an unexpectedly aggressive jerk, things get a little tense. The iPhone on my host's desk starts going berserk with incoming messages. The first few are politely ignored, but at last the phone's owner excuses himself and reads closely. Looking ever so slightly queasy, he eventually explains, “they raised by fifty”. Asked if this means that private-sector investment in India, already weak, will take a lurch down, he shrugs: “Of course.”

China's high-speed train crash

The unfiltered responses to a terrible train crash leave the Communist Party scrambling

CHINA'S high-speed railway network, once a source of great pride for the Communist Party, has turned into an embarrassment. A collision between two trains on July 23rd near the coastal city of Wenzhou not only killed at least 35 people but also unleashed a torrent of online criticism of the network and the railway bureaucracy.

China's legal system

THE deportation of Lai Changxing counts as a big victory for Chinese officialdom, which has been trying to get him back for a solid decade. It had always seemed likely that Mr Lai paid huge bribes to people who still hold high office in the state structure; it will be in their interest to ensure that he is somewhere he can't spill the beans.

It is also a great victory for China's government for the extent to which it validates its legal system. Canada and its independent judiciary are in effect saying that the Chinese legal system can be taken at its word.

Strikes in Kazakhstan

DISGRUNTLED oil workers in western Kazakhstan's Mangistau region have been on strike for over two months now, with no end in sight. Their demands for better pay and working conditions have so far been either ignored or rejected. Their main complaint is that foreign employees doing the same job receive twice as much in wages. Management claim—that the strikers are being greedy, as their salaries are well above the country's average—has been denied furiously. The workers say representatives from the state oil company have been lying about the salaries they are paid.

Tibet, China and America

ON THE topic of Tibet, Xi Jinping, the man widely expected to be the next leader of the Chinese Communist Party, sounds much like his predecessors. Speaking on July 19th in the capital, Lhasa, in front of the Potala Palace, former residence of the Dalai Lamas, Tibet's spiritual leaders, he celebrated the way Chinese rule had led Tibet “from the dark toward the light”.

In material terms, he has an obvious point. Tibet is far better-off than in 1951, when a young Dalai Lama reached a “17-point agreement” ceding Chinese sovereignty over the territory.

Laos and the drugs trade

THE new prime minister of Laos, Thongsing Thammavong, has taken the country's drugs problem into his own hands with good Communist brio. At an event co-sponsored by the government and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in late June Mr Thongsing, wearing a business suit and wielding a giant torch, helped put fire to an enormous stash of seized opium, heroin and cannabis. Three weeks later the prime minister reinforced his message by concluding a co-operation agreement with Myanmar, Laos's big neighbour to the north-west, on the prosecution of drug trafficking.

India and the Nobel peace prize

AFTER the Nobel committee in Norway last year awarded its annual peace prize to a jailed Chinese writer and dissident, Liu Xiaobo, controversy raged for months. China's government huffed and snarled, blocked any relatives from travelling to pick up the prize, told ambassadors of friendly countries to boycott the ceremony, then launched its own, bizarre, rival peace prize. For those who fret about China, both the authorities' original treatment of their dissident and their reaction to the prize offered troubling evidence of growing illiberalism.

Summertime in Kashmir

WHEN newspaper-reading outsiders think of Kashmir these days, they understandably conjure images of stone-throwing youths, repressive soldiers, curfews and conflict. Yet in the lulls between confrontations, when Kashmir's separatists pause from exhaustion and the number of militants creeping over from across the border is at low tide, another Kashmir flourishes.

It is tourist season now in Srinagar, the summer capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Bombings in Mumbai

OPERA HOUSE in south Mumbai, where one of Tuesday's bombs went off, is just a short walk from Chowpatty beach. This is the place where in 1951 Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, is said to have reduced a crowd of 200,000 to tears with the words, “If at all I am a beggar, I am begging for your love.” As with the other two neighbourhoods in the city struck by terrorists, it is at first hard to spot where the explosion happened; shattered pavements, collapsing buildings and roads strewn with broken pipes are not unusual here. The actual site is sealed on one side by a police barrier partly made of broken furniture, and on the other by two giant, brightly coloured cloths.

Bombs in Mumbai

ON A sodden evening in Dadar, a middle-class neighbourhood in central Mumbai, one end of a bus stop still displays an ad for pro-biotic yoghurt. The other end is blown to bits. A tarpaulin, gathering water, has been hastily laid to cover the pavement next to it and a crowd is gathered nearby, including a man offering to trade gruesome photos taken on his phone. A local man says he heard the explosion and came out to see bodies being dragged away.

The bomb, like blasts in two other neighbourhoods in the south of the city, went off at about 7pm, during rush hour. Across Mumbai on July 13th bombs killed 18 people and injured 113, according to the chief minister of Maharashtra state.

Education in South Korea

WHEN school textbooks make the headlines in East Asia, they are usually cast as bystanders to some intractable old dispute, and related demands that children be taught “correct” history. Thankfully though, future-minded officials in South Korea have given cause for this correspondent to write about something altogether different: by 2015, all of the country's dead-tree textbooks will be phased out, in favour of learning materials carried on tablet computers and other devices.

The cost of setting up the network will be $2.1 billion. It is hoped that cutting out printing costs will go some way towards compensating for this expenditure.